One man's trash

I’m an idiot.

I honestly can’t believe it took me this long to think of this.

It’s a stupid easy strategy to add more traffic to your eCom website.

And funny enough, I actually have Google to thank for the idea.

They rolled out their “Helpful” Content Update in late 2023 — it basically killed niche sites.

I am not at all upset to see some of those sites go, especially the ones riddled with display ads between every paragraph and dozens of affiliate links.

Those sites were among the worst ones on the internet — good riddance.

Unfortunately, some really solid sites got wrapped up in this update, and full-time bloggers saw their traffic disappear overnight.

I do feel for those people.

But hey, there’s no crying in baseball SEO.

I’ve mentioned this a handful of times, but eCommerce sites were largely unaffected by this update.

In fact, most of our sites saw massive gains after the update (per usual).

Dubs in the chat.

So, “Why the hell are you still talking about the update if it didn’t affect you, Kai?”

Because it actually did affect me — it gave me an (albeit delayed) idea.

Most niche sites operated this way: find all of the lowest competition keywords possible in a given niche and cover all of them.

Many of these sites thrived on super long-tail, question-type keywords.

Niche sites weren’t competing on big money keywords, they were “competing” for scraps at the bottom of the food pyramid.

But even with scraps, many niche site owners were generating $20k+/month with their blogs.

But not anymore.

Google literally took all that away.

So now, tons of these websites exist on the internet. Many of them have excellent content that used to drive 50,000+ clicks each month.

BUT now, many of them have fallen to sub 5,000 clicks.

That sucks for them, but personally, I think that’s a waste of good content.

And I hate to see things go to waste — so I’m going to take it for myself.

Their now trash is my treasure.

No, I’m not plagiarizing it — that’d be pathetic.

I’m simply identifying the formerly top niche sites in whatever niche I’m working in, then determining which of their pages have lost the most traffic in the last 6 months, and putting them in a spreadsheet.

I’ll spin it into the style I need and run our standard content creation process so it’s unique to us (& far from plagiarized).

Then I’ll slap it on an eCom site, which let me remind you, Google loves.

Call it unethical, call it whatever you want.

I’m reverse engineering something that works and adapting it for myself — that’s the oldest way of doing business.

They can’t use it anymore, I may as well.

Catch you next time.

Kai